What is an archived user?

Archiving moves a former employee’s account into a special “archived” state. Their data is preserved securely, but they can no longer sign in to anything, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, or any other Workspace service. In short, the account is locked and parked, while everything inside it stays safe and retrievable.

When you archive someone, the account is assigned a low-cost Archived User licence instead of a full Workspace licence. That full licence is then freed up, usually within 24 hours, to reassign to someone else on your team.

What actually happens to the account

Once a user is archived:

• They can’t log in to their managed Google account anywhere.
• They’re removed from the company directory and Global Address List.
• New emails and calendar invitations sent to them are blocked.
• Their data remains intact and can be accessed by colleagues who hold a Google Vault licence, with any Vault retention rules and legal holds still applying.
• You can unarchive them later, restoring their previous access and data, or delete them permanently when you’re confident the data is no longer needed.
• Their data stays in place and continues to count toward your organisation’s pooled storage, so nothing is lost in the move to an archived licence.

It’s a clean, reversible state, which is exactly what you want during the uncertain weeks and months after someone departs.

Why archive instead of delete or suspend?

When an employee leaves, admins typically reach for one of three options. Here’s how they compare:

• Delete. Cheapest, but risky. After a short recovery window the account and all its data are gone for good. If a client query, an invoice, or a contract was sitting in that mailbox, you’ve lost it.
• Suspend. Keep the data, but you keep paying for a full Workspace licence indefinitely. Fine as a short-term measure, expensive as a long-term one.
• Archive. Preserves the data, blocks access, and swaps the full licence for a much cheaper Archived User licence. You free up the seat for a new hire and stop paying full price to store a leaver’s history.

For most departures, archiving is the sensible default. You retain the institutional knowledge, satisfy data-retention obligations, tighten your security posture, and trim your monthly bill, all at once.

A quick note: archived data still counts toward your organisation’s pooled storage, so archiving manages your licensing, not your storage limits. Something to keep an eye on if you archive a lot of accounts over time.

Make archiving part of your offboarding checklist

The best time to decide how you handle leavers is before someone leaves. We recommend building a simple, repeatable offboarding process, and archiving belongs right at the centre of it.

As a South African Google Workspace partner, Cozan Consulting helps clients set this up the right way: choosing the correct licences, configuring archiving and data retention, and making sure no client data or compliance obligation slips through the cracks when staff move on. You deal with a local team, get support in English or Afrikaans, and receive a single invoice for everything.